Tales from the Dawn

[Iscah]

That's a hell of a lot easier to say when it's your favored characters that get to live, over the lives of those whose memories they trample upon with every blundering, bumbling, clodding step they make. But, what the hell I'll allow you that.

I don't "take sides". I liked all of the characters I met who were not trying to kill me at the time. (I particularly like Hyth. He's one of my favourite characters in Endwalker.)

But at the same time, I went into Elpis knowing that the whole point of that arc was going to be meeting people who were doomed to a calamity I could not prevent, only observe.

For the sake of the narrative, the Sundering has to happen. This has been fated since Heavensward. They could do it while showing us the Ancients were awful people or nice people, and they went with nice, but their fate has been locked in since before the characters were written.

Their sole purpose in the narrative is to be "the people who suffered the Final Days and the Sundering".

Would you have preferred them to be written as awful people?

After all, I too hope to Zodiark they don't make such a colossal fuckup such as Endwalker ever again. Glad to see we're finally on the same page, say it with me now: GENOCIDE JUSTIFICATION AS THE CORE ETHOS OF YOUR NARRATIVE IS BAD. ;3

I have never not been on that page. I am really unhappy with how Venat behaved post-Elpis. It seems utterly at odds with everything that came before and after it.

At the same time, the conclusion I come to here is that the writers did a poor job of writing Venat as a good person forced to do a dreadful thing, and accidentally wrote her into being a horrible person. If the rest of the narrative is built around her being a good person, then the logical course for me is to ignore the badly written parts and pretend it was something that better reflected the author's intent.

Turns out, if they had simply kept the characterization of the Scions, the moral nuance, and the black and grey plot they so carefully cultivated in Shadowbringers chances are keen none of this endless Venat vs. Emet or whichever else Ascian of the day debates on this forum wouldn't be happening. And wouldn't that have been nice, every party satisfied!

How would that have helped? Venat's actions in the Sundering are the most morally grey part of the whole resolution.

What are you actually envisaging we would have gotten instead? What characterisation has changed in your view?